


the freedom of music

by Origamidragons



Series: oh, what a lovely day! (everyone's a goddamn junker au) [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone's a Goddamn Junker, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, First Meetings, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mentions of Death, mentions of canon-typical violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 15:12:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13573221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Origamidragons/pseuds/Origamidragons
Summary: The girl had been locked in the darkness for five days, two hours, and forty-seven minutes.The boy was a wasteland wanderer with sunlight in his eyes and music in his heart.They met in the middle.





	the freedom of music

Five days, two hours, and forty-seven minutes. Her lips were dry and cracking, but she resisted the almost unbearable urge to lick them, knowing that after a few seconds of relief the saliva would evaporate and it would be even worse than before. The closet was dark, and she had tucked herself into the far corner, hugging her knees to her chest with her one remaining arm. There was a crack of light under the door, bright in the pitch blackness, and she kept her gaze fixed on it, watching for any shadows cast by the intruders. 

They were probably gone. She thought they were gone. She hadn’t heard anything from them for a couple days now, but every time she considered calling out for help, she heard the screams- of her teachers, of her friends- and shrank back again. A shudder ran across her shoulders. 

She was so thirsty. 

_The maximum time an individual can subsist without water seems to be a week._

She licked her lips and tasted blood. 

She wanted to go home. 

The attack had been so swift, so brutal. It had started with the rumbling of explosions, so loud and wild that at first she had thought there was a thunderstorm outside. The walls had been quickly broken down, the hard-light constructs disintegrating back into the nothing from which they had come, and the barbarians had stampeded in. 

Sanjay had told her, as the sleek jet cut through the air towards the quarantined continent, that this was an opportunity. That after the explosion of the fusion core, Australia had been reduced to a lawless, chaotic wasteland, and bringing order from chaos was what Vishkar excelled at. She was lucky, he’d told her, as phantom pains from the arm he had ordered amputated and replaced by a prosthetic sang to up her shoulder. She got to be on the front lines of Vishkar’s greatest work yet, the light-weaving prodigy who would save Australia. 

_Lucky._

A weak, croaking laugh rose in her throat, but she swallowed it back, just in time. _They could still be out there._

Sanjay had escaped, she was fairly certain. She’d heard the jet engines firing to life from her hiding place as the initial attack reached its climax. He’d left her. She wasn’t _surprised_ , of course, she hadn’t been stupid enough to trust his snide smile and darting eyes, but the betrayal still hurt, a confused, stabbing pain between her lungs. 

He’d just… _left_ her. 

Her eyes stung with tears and she buried her face in her knees, half-surprised by the moisture that ran down her cheeks. She hadn’t thought there was any water left in her to lose. Time slid into a meaningless blur, hours having no meaning in the dark, motionless stillness of her sanctuary. The world outside the closet had long since gone quiet, and she had nothing to ground herself with. She was drifting, lost, detached from reality. She was so tired, so hungry, so _thirsty._

There was a footstep, and she froze, icy shivers running up her spine. She shoved herself as far back into the corner as she could, and prayed to all the gods of her home whose names she’d forgotten that whoever it was would pass her by. 

Another footstep, and another. She could see the shadow of the intruder dancing along the narrow slice of visible floor, dark silhouettes of feet appearing in front of her only source of light and blocking it out. 

“ _Olá?_ ” a voice called out carefully. 

The girl blinked. 

This voice was different. It wasn’t one she knew, not the voice of any of her teachers or classmates. But… it wasn’t like the furious, rough, cruel voices of the men and women who had broken down their walls, the voices that had scraped at her ears and clawed at her brain, too much, too _loud_. It sounded… young. Good. Gentle. It made her think of the tiny garden her mother had pampered with so much care, where she always used to sit when the world became too much. 

“Hello?” the voice tried again. “ _Está aqui alguém?_ ”

She didn’t understand the words, but she thought she could guess the meaning from the searching tones. 

_Is anyone here?_

She realized, suddenly, that she had a choice to made. The revelation made her stomach lurch. She had never made a choice for herself in her life. Vishkar had made all of her decisions for her, the decision to take her from her home, to amputate and replace her arm, to bring her to this hellish wasteland. 

Her choices were really remarkably simple, though, weren’t they? She could make her presence known and face the consequences, be they good or ill, from whoever was outside that door… or she could wait for him to leave, and… 

...and then what? 

Die of thirst, most likely. 

She opened her mouth without consciously deciding to and felt her dry lower lip split from the sudden movement. The coppery tang of blood flooded her mouth. 

“Here,” she said, and was startled by the cracking weakness of her own voice, rusty from the lack of water and of use. “I’m- I’m here, _main yahaan hoon,_ let… please let me out, please…”

The footsteps paused, then they were running, and then the door was wrenched open, and light flooded the closet. It burned at the girl’s eyes with vicious brightness, and she brought her hand up to shield them, flinching away. 

She forced them open, slowly, letting her eyes adjust to the sudden return of vision. 

In front of her, there was a boy, crouching to be at eye level with her. She guessed he was probably around the same age as her, maybe a year or so younger. His hair was long and twisted into dozens of little braids, and his skin was dark, darker than hers. He wore shorts and a battered green tank top at least a size too big for him. 

He was smiling, and, impossibly, she found her own chapped and bloody lips starting to curve upwards in response. 

“ _Olá!_ ” he said, like they weren’t meeting in a half-destroyed building, like there wasn’t a pool of spilled blood congealing in the hallway outside, like the smell of smoke didn’t still linger in the air. “ _Eu sou Lúcio. Quem é você?_ ”

She stared blankly at him for a moment before tone and context began to catch up with her and she understood that this was an introduction of sorts. 

“Satya,” she whispered, her voice splintering like so much dry wood. A flicker of concern crossed his face, so open and easy to read, and the next thing she knew he was pressing something into her hand and helping her raise it to her lips. 

_Water._

It was blessedly cool, soothing the dry roughness of her throat, and she drank greedily, only barely remembering to moderate herself in order to not vomit. She drained it dry steadily, pausing between gulps, feeling life begin to seep back into her dehydrated body. The empty metal thermos clattered to the floor, the sound startlingly loud in the silence. 

The boy- Lúcio?- offered her his hand, and she barely hesitated before taking it. He pulled her to her feet, and she swayed dangerously, her head swimming and vision blurring for a moment. Her missing arm threw her balance off further, and she felt herself stumble. He stopped her from falling, and slung her one remaining arm carefully over his shoulders. She slumped against him, letting him take most of her weight, and focused all her attention on putting one foot in front of the other. 

One foot in front of the other.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Hello! Thank you so much for reading my story! I love you!
> 
> Notes:  
> -Story title is from "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush.  
> -This is chapter one of this pair's story. There will probably be three chapters total, and the next one will be told from Lúcio's point of view.  
> -This takes place about two years after the explosion of the Australian Omnium. Lúcio has therefore been surviving on his own in the wasteland for awhile, while Satya has been living in the sheltered environment of Vishkar's ill-advised academy.  
> -Satya was taught English, and it was what they were always supposed to use at Vishkar, but she can slip back into her native language of Hindi when very distressed. Lúcio speaks Portuguese and a few words of English. 
> 
> Translations (disclaimer- most of these are from Google translate, please correct me if they are wrong):  
> - _Olá_ : Portuguese for 'hello'  
> - _Está aqui alguém?_ : Portuguese for 'is anyone here?'  
> - _Main yahaan hoon_ : Hindi for 'I am here'  
> - _Eu sou Lúcio. Quem é você?_ : Portuguese for 'I'm Lúcio. Who are you?'


End file.
